From Sumner on June 10, 1859, just days after the election for delegates to the Wyandotte Constitutional Convention, Ingalls wrote his father about the "well fought" contest in a county (Atchison) that was "an old stronghold of pro-slavery democracy." Ingalls won, of course, even though he at first "regarded the contest as a hopeless one," but still feared that the Democrats could control the convention; if so, "Kansas may be a Slave State after all. . . . It is Estimated that there are five hundred slaves in the territory today by virtue of the Dred Scott decision. A family recently came to this place from Kentucky with five."

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